i Parkia biglobosa - School of Forest Resources & Environmental ...

to plow his land. In Kandiga, there were certain members of the community more
educated and able to earn salaries: schoolteachers, agricultural extensionists working for
the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and health workers. Other individuals generated
income by hairdressing, tailoring, and trading goods. However, all these community
members were still actively involved in farming. Most farming is labor intensive relying
on manual labor. Everyone works during the farming season. Children are excused from
school and farmers are in their fields before sunrise and after sunset. Farmers spend long
hours hoeing, sowing seeds, and removing the grasses and weeds competing with the
crops for the precious rain and soil. Children spend their time pegging goats, herding
sheep, herding cows and preventing them from eating the newly emerging crops. As the
crops mature, harvesting is also intensive difficult manual labor. Farmers gather and
harvest the heads of millet and sorghum, bundle the stalks, pulling up the groundnuts
plants, then removing the groundnuts from the roots. Groundnuts are harvested by
pulling the entire plant from the ground when the soil is still soft from the rain. If the
rains have stopped and the crop is still in the ground, women carry headpans of water to
the fields in order to soften the soil enough to extract the groundnuts.
Food security is an indisputable problem for these subsistence farmers. Many
risks are related to this farming system. These farmers rely on the one rainy season to
produce adequate food to sustain them and their families throughout the year. Farmers
must consider the proper sowing time of the seed. Rains early in the season are
inconsistent and unpredictable. If a farmer sows his seeds too early, he may risk losing
all his seed if the next rains do not arrive and all the newly germinated seeds dry up and
die. Farmers suffer from droughts ranging from a single year to severe droughts lasting
28